Labour must win back significant numbers of parliamentary seats in Scotland if it is to be seen as a legitimate UK-wide government, Keir Starmer has said.
Speaking on a BBC Radio 4 programme about politics in Scotland after the recent turmoil in the Scottish National party (SNP), including the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon as SNP leader and first minister, Starmer said this was an important aim for his party.
“It matters to the Labour party,” Starmer told Leading Scotland Where?, which will be broadcast on Wednesday. “I want to be not the prime minister of the UK, but the prime minister for the UK. That means a strong showing in Scotland, so we have that legitimacy.”
The overwhelming success of the SNP in recent general elections has seen Labour collapse from being the biggest party in Scotland to currently holding just one of the 59 Scottish Westminster seats.
As recently as the 2010 election, Labour won 41 Scottish seats, but collapsed to just one in 2015. This rose to seven in 2017, but slipped again in 2019.
The SNP, by contrast, went from taking six seats in 2010 to 56 at the next election, and now has 45 MPs. It won 48 in the 2019 election, but two MPs defected to the new Alba party, while another, Margaret Ferrier, lost the SNP whip.
Labour in Scotland are privately hopeful that they could make significant gains, with some recent polling showing the party only a handful of points behind the SNP in Westminster voting intentions.
Earlier this month, the SNP’s former chief executive Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband, was arrested by police investigating the spending of funds earmarked for an independence campaign. He was later released pending further investigation.
Police searched the couple’s home in Glasgow and the SNP’s headquarters in Edinburgh.
SNP members elected Humza Yousaf, formerly Scotland’s health minister, to replace Sturgeon after a bruising electoral battle in which he narrowly beat Kate Forbes by 52% to 48%.
Asked about possible Labour gains in Scotland, Starmer said the need to win more seats was “not translated into a number”. “It does mean I need and want to be able to show that we have significant support in Scotland, as we do in Wales and will have across England,” he said.
Ian Blackford, the SNP’s former leader at Westminster, told the same programme his party needed to take the threat from Labour seriously. He said: “Labour is an alternative to the Tories for the rest of the UK and I get that. I can understand why people would look positively at voting for Labour in such a scenario.”
